Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert M. Parker, Jr.

Parker’s line reads like a toast disguised as a principle: a neat inversion of the tidy American maxim about moderation. Coming from the wine critic who helped turn tasting notes into a consumer religion, it isn’t just hedonism. It’s a defense of intensity as a form of seriousness. “Excessively” is doing a lot of work here. It winks at indulgence, yes, but it also insists that expertise is built on repetition, obsession, and a willingness to go farther than polite taste says you should.

The intent is partly self-justification, partly provocation. Parker made his name by treating wine not as aristocratic mystique but as something you could score, compare, and buy with confidence. That project requires excess: more bottles, more calibration, more certainty than the old gatekeepers preferred. The subtext is: amateurs sip; professionals commit. If you’re going to take pleasure seriously, you have to be willing to look a little unhinged in pursuit of it.

Context matters because Parker’s career sits at the crossroads of two late-20th-century forces: the democratization of luxury and the rise of quantification as cultural authority. His famous 100-point scale didn’t just rate wine; it taught audiences to trust appetite with a spreadsheet behind it. So the quote isn’t merely about overdoing it. It’s about staking out legitimacy for a critic’s appetite, turning excess into a credential, and making obsession sound like common sense.